Here’s a question: How many fellow collection professionals have you talked to lately about challenges you have faced on the collection floor? The vague but ideal answer would be: Many! Unfortunately, in an effort to a exude success many professionals will keep everyday struggles to themselves. This philosophy makes those struggles theirs alone. But sharing with others not only opens the door to valuable advice from fellow seasoned professionals, it also reflects favorably on the dispenser as a benevolent and astute member of the industry.

Receivables Advisor spoke with several collection professionals about challenges they have faced on the collection floor and how they leveraged their technological prowess and resources to overcome them.

What was a challenge on the collection floor and how did technology help your agency overcome it?

G. Scott Purcell
President of Professional Credit

purcell scottThe need we had on the collection floor was a technology platform with the flexibility to support a vast number of client interface requirements and to meet rapidly evolving consumer communication preferences. We have implemented a solution that allows us to achieve this. Our new AR management system, ARTrail, includes an EDI [electronic data interchange] subsystem, RoboDX, that seamlessly connects to both legacy and contemporary systems and handles any number of data configurations. It also provides interoperability with any communications platform, and manages workflows for consumer contact via text, email, IVR, telephone or letter.

Michael Ryalls
Chief Strategy Officer of RGS Financial

ryalls michaelWhen servicing sophisticated financial services clients, compliance is as important as performance. A great scorecard will not save you from poor compliance ratings. The challenge is managing QA [quality assurance] and collection performance on 100% of your contacts. CallMiner, with 100% speech analytics seems like a great solution, but we found it requires a high level of expertise to operate effectively. To achieve real results, you must train or hire internally, and both are very costly. After two years of trying, our solution was to partner with Provana and utilize their ICAP (Integrated Call Analytics Platform) product where they provide the know-how.

Howard George
CEO of Receivables Performance Management, LLC

george howard2Over the last few years Receivables Performance Management, LLC has noticed a shift in the behavior of the consumers we speak to: longer conversations that don’t result in a payment, and a shifting preference of younger consumers for a conversation-free solution to resolving their bill. Both of these challenges were addressed by an upgrade to RPM’s online payment portal. The new portal now serves as a full solution for consumers that prefer to resolve their bill on their own. It features the ability to setup full payment plans, settlements and a budgeting tool to help determine the right payment amounts.

Nate Kalnins
VP of Operations of The Stark Collection Agency

kalnins nate2Challenge: Gathering and integrating data

Solution: Our office has struggled at compiling usable data from our collection software and other outside sources and finding real-time, actionable insights from this data. Analysis could be done, but it required pulling programmers away from other projects to gather the data. To alleviate this problem, we began using Microsoft Power BI. This software allows the user to pull data from dozens of disparate sources (including our collection software, Excel, Access databases, web pages and more) to make the analytics-driven decisions needed to drive our business forward. Power BI allows for easily understood reports which can be easily generated without the involvement of a programmer.